Imagine having traveled to sixty-seven countries, resided in seven, and speaking five languages. Imagine growing up in a multicultural household with two linguist parents. Imagine, in mid-September 2001, being a Yemeni-Bosnian-American child, told that you could no longer speak your language. Imagine Alia Ali.
The 34-year-old artist, now in Los Angeles for her Masters in Fine Art, went to college thinking she’d become a lawyer or politician. But the mastery of words to shape, debate, and defend ideas gave way to an unexpected passion through a required art history foundations course.
“I noticed that in other classes I had to repeat or regurgitate what I was learning to show that I understood. In my art classes everything was about producing my own ideas on my own terms,” Ali explained. “That’s when I fell in love with art. Specifically with photography and film, I realized that these visual artforms are inherently ambiguous. There’s so much room for interpretation and discussion and dialogue about what everything means. It is democratizing to free up the dialog around visual linguistics.”